THOMAS H. LEITH

From: JASA 11 (December
1959): 3-13.

By analyzing past attempts at synthesizing theism and science,
the need for an adequate contemporary philosophy in the area,
capable of meeting past failures, is presented. Important issues
may then be outlined between the attitudes of presently fashionable philosophies of science toward such synthesis and varied
types of Christian study therein. The necessity of a careful
choice of a unique theistic starting point is offered as the only
path to a useful and abiding resolution.

Huxley, the great English biologist, once remarked
that "extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of
every infant science like the strangled snakes about
that of the infant Hercules." It is with regard to Santayana's reminder that "those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to repeat it" and in the hope
of preventing the above cruelty to my theological
brethren that this paper is given. While none of us is
infallible, even the youngest, I shall assay an escape
from Santayana's chains of history by the simple device of reminding the theologian that he cannot impede
the growth of an infant he needs must succor and of
reminding the scientist that he may not debach the
theology he needs must sanction. If this is a worthy
purpose, my task then is not to bury either but to
praise the first-fruits of both.

A well-known schoolboy malapropism reveals that
"the difference between Science and Religion is that
Science is material and Religion is immaterial". Much
as our day decries in many quarters and with divers
voices the perspicacity of our student, surely the acts
of his seniors reveal his discernment. There are those
who are akin to Faraday who, in his letter to Lady
Lovelace, informs us that he went into his lab and
forgot his religion and came out again and remembered
it. Others like Haldane, failing totally in memory, cry
"scientific education and religious education are incompatible. . . Religion is still parasitic in the interstices of our knowledge which have not yet been filled.
Like bed-bugs in the cracks of walls and furniture,
miracles lurk in the lacunae of science."l The army of
both is legion and the Christian must face it with purpose.

But the tragedy of tragedies is that platoon of
Christians who march in step with it, or provide food
for its appetite albeit blindly, calling to all who will
bear, "Worship and thought are distinct. My ways, of fellow scientists, are your ways and my thoughts
are your thoughts!" But must not science and religious

*Paper presented at the 14th Annual Convention
of
the American
Scientific Affiliation. Chicago, Illinois, June, 1959.

belief be mutually intelligible and mutually interdependent? In our day, can either live, as
implied above, coherently if apart? Or we hear again, "In
my God you must believe! How else explain life's
origin? The hiatuses of my paleontology? The indeterminancies of my quanta? 'The mind of my psychology?
May one not exclaim here as did Henry Drummond,
"As if God lived in gaps!" Must we not remind these
Christians that if they do not have valid arguments
for their beliefs they surely do love their prejudices?
But need they be anyone else's?

It is often remarked that the sciences haven't failed
man: rather man has failed them. Have not such
Christians often failed both? Reinbold Niebuhr writes, "Nature can be known through scientific enquiry, but
scientific knowledge does not disclose its own meaning." To be sure, hasty and premature explanations of
this meaning have proven to be job's false comforters
in the history of the church, and as the above indicates,
even today, but if the Christian view is the only way
to redraw the map of knowledge, should it not best be
done by those who have done some intellectual traveling particularly in theology and in the sciences? As
John Baillie so wisely observed, "Surely the depth of
the problem emerges only when the man of science and
the man of faith are the same man, so that the two
who have to walk together are but two elements in
the total outlook of a single mind."2

My plea then is for a revitalized witness to science
by those aware of its difficulties. We must point out
that the scientist has a range of awareness transcending
the purely scientific discussion of experiences and that to find understanding in nature, he must pass beyond
a purely scientific universe.3 As Pasteur said, "(There
is) something in the depths of our souls which tells
us that the world may be more that a mere combination
of phenomena." We must make clear too that God
doesn't exist because a famous scientist says so, nor

,cease because an infamous theologian agrees, popular
though these beliefs are in rather different quarters.
His existence is axiomatic. Only then may we challenge
that indifference so clearly portrayed in Wood's observation, "Probably the revolution that has had the
profoundest effect upon religion in modem times is
not that caused by science itself, but by the absorption
of the scientist in his science. I-Te feels no need to go
outside its range for intellectual and emotional satisfaction . . . They set up for themselves and other
people a climate of opinion in which religion need
play no part."4

But lest it escapes in unwonted satisfaction, let me
point out too that theology needs to, and has often
failed to,
provide
this vitality of witness. An anti-scientific Christian, just as an anti-Christian scientist, is
not Baillie's 'man of faith and science'. In both cases
prejudice or lack of communication sunder what must
be united. R. G. Collingwood states this so well. "Religion always mistakes what it says for what it means.
And rationalism, so to speak, runs about after it
pointing out that what it says is untrue."5 If anything
is to be gained by contemporary stress on semantics it
is this: speak wisely and clearly if you would be understood, and in particular if you would adjust that
strife of the religious and scientific temper of mind,
that debate between the critical intellect and the inner
spirit which would fain believe.

With these introductory comments let me move to
my appointed task. If what we have said is rather negative in tone, what positive remarks may be made? Of
course time and ability must stay my zeal here. I do
not intend like Priestley, in the late 18th Cent., to be
"induced to undertake the history of all branches of
experimental philosophy" in their relation to our problem but rather to survey the general need for a fruitful synthesis of Christianity and science. Unfortunately,
it is impossible in this effort to avoid the use of the
big brush though I will try to avoid the slovenly use
of that utensil. Let me begin by placing, as I see them,
the sciences in their appropriate position in this dialectic.

Huxley, writing to Kingsley advised, "Sit down before a fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to
whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn
nothing." Despite the desirable plea for open-mindedness it is unfortunate that this Baconian ideal, as even
a cursory reading of Bacon himself will reveal, turns
out to be unattainable. The same applies to Whitehouse's observation that "the scientific attitude may be
a gift of God which can liberate us from the idolatry
of divinised tradition in the same way that it has freed
us from the idolatry of divinised nature."6 No scientist
(indeed no man) is so humble, so lacking in preconception, so apart from the past of his teachers and
societal mores that he can become a
divinised
scientist. Indeed were science only as Prof. Young stated
in his Reith Lectures, "in the end practical
...
serving
to ensure that so many of us can live on earth"7 it Still
must be replete with the prior value judgments of the
scientific community.8 And again, were science but
calculated unfolding of nature it still must run the
Socratic risk of the
Phaedo
where the sage tells us
that science alone leads to blindness of soul. Who cannot feel the pangs of Darwin as he tells us "his higher
tastes . . . were atrophied" as his mind became "a kind
of machine for grinding general laws out of large
collections of facts"? The scientific
man
cannot escape
his humanity in the interest of becoming an animated Univac. If faith dies so must science. Mere inquisitiveness won't sustain the proper attitude of mind.
A speculative interest in nature's manner of proceeding
depends on the assumption of a meaningful nature
with a controlling purpose. "The scientific intellect
often slays the object that it loves in order to understand it
...
Perhaps this is the reason why poets and
scientists do not understand each other."9

Indeed, I feel Waddington said more that he
thought when he remarked, "Science is concerned to
discover how things work and its test for truth is that
it makes them work as it wants to." Scientific laws are
not only descriptive hypotheses which bear much fruit, they are really
prescriptive
models into which
we
fit
the data of observation as long as no great violence
seems to occur in the whole
weltanschauung.
of our
science nor in the value of the model for suggesting
future experiments. However, this temporary form of
interpretation must not be confused with the eternal
substance of God's immutable law. Thus science is to
a greater degree than is often asknowledged a product
of
our
scene,
our
interests, and
our
spiritual condition.

What then must the Christian realize and proclaim?
He must realize that while nature is never understood
without experiment nor described without geometry
as the 13th Cent. Oxonian Grosseteste proclaimed, it
is incapable of ultimate resolution in these alone. Demanding religious commitment, science needs the
challenge of the orientation of Biblical theism. In addition to failing to provide this, the placing of science
by the Christian in some abhored naturalistic limbo
forgets that science itself doesn't lead to naturalism.
The naturalistic commitment was felt long before
science, which indeed is the abode of many a non-naturalist and the product of the Christian church. Every
scientist must say 'yea' or 'nay' to God but no Christian may say 'nay' to God's voice in nature. In fact, as
Archbishop Temple affirmed "unless all existence is
a medium of Revelation, no particular revelation is
possible" thereby linking Kant's starry heavens with
the moral responsibility of man.10

And what must the Christian proclaim? Is it not
the following which Burtt outlines? He notes that the
thinker who decries metaphysics will actually hold
metaphysical notions of three main types. He will share
the ideas of his age on ultimate questions (where he
agrees) ; his method will tend to be turned into a metaphysics, ie. he will assume the universe of such a sort
that his method will be appropriate and successful -
and if a great mind he cannot avoid ultimate questions
else he cannot have full intellectual satisf action.
11
Must we not add to these Bavinck's great truth, "What
nature is to us is determined by what we think of God to our day but our principal grammar must be approand who He is for us"? If we remove God from His priate to a revelational theism and
firmly ensconsed creation we end up investing it with the character of God.12 Is it not finally then the Christian argument
that the disputing guides of men may leave the guided
to complain justly that he has been abandoned in the
metaphysical jungle without even a way of identifying
the animals and that only God's self-revelation may
truly guide?13

Hence, we find science and theology in need of one
another. We may not compartmentalize without a
wholesale oversimplification of the aims of both. The
spiritual and natural realms cannot be in conflict.
Science, theology, and the ethics within both "are
intertwined and cannot be separated without the entire
structure's collapse."
14
The scientist must be reminded,
as Thos. Pratt observed in 1667, "It is a dangerous
mistake into which many good men fall that we neglect
the dominion of God over the world if we do not discover in every turn of human actions many supernatural providences and miraculous events. Whereas it
is enough for the honor of His government that he
guides the whole creation in its wonted course of
causes and effects."15 And the Christian must continually observe that "when we come to the scientifically
unknown, our correct policy is not to rejoice because
we have found God: it is to become better scientist,
and to think a bit more deeply and imaginatively until
we can devise some model, or some concept, that will
bring the previous unknown into the pattern of the known."16 Thus both must see that God is the God of
all; not just the miraculous or the mysterious. Science
should understand nature as demanding God (and
that a God who illuminates His acts in His creation
by the enlightenment of Scripture) while theology
must see its system and its Biblical sources isolated
and starved without deep thought about the general
revelation of God that it is meant to clarify and portray.

As generality this is all quite appropriate, but what
is the detail of this union of science with theology? Is
history not replete with syntheses weighed and found
wanting? What audacity is it that assumes we can
escape the inexorable decay of some potential monument of our thought under the erosive scrutiny of our
progeny? My reply is, I believe, both simple and correct. We must, as I mentioned earlier, learn from the
past and its heart-rending list of failures. Let us cull
out error and save the timeless which is truth. Let us
assay to construct on lasting foundations. To be sure,
any apologetic system in the area of our interest is a
product of the problems of its day and fades as the
problems are revised or forgotten. Any human system
must expect this, but what has this to do with the
validity of its methods? It is tragic only when the foundation, the principles, the basic ideas are found incorrect and unwarranted. We are expected only to speak
within it so as to challenge the future as well as our
own time. May we then turn for a few moments, with
these thoughts in mind, to the broad sweep of the last
five centuries of church history before more carefully
scrutinizing the recent past and our present scene?

I am sure that most of my audience will recall that
the intellectual scene, insofar as it interests us here,
was prepared for the Renaissance by, among other
things, the partial decay of the great 13th Cent. synthesis of human knowledge in the Summa. of Thomas
Aquinas. The problem of our paper which had appeared to have been given resolution were now, by
many, found wanting. Where Aquinas had closely delineated the distinction between faith and reason and
defined their limits, these limits were now altered radically. The great eclectic had placed certain dogmas
of the church beyond reason but not contrary to it.
With Sotus the list is enlarged and with Occam all
that has not its source in the data of the senses becomes
faith. Where Aquinas had found God clearly, though
partially, revealed to all men in His creation, for
Scotus more is hidden, and for Occam the need for
making suitable assumptions makes the proof of God
the consequence of arbitrary prior decision. Thus by
the middle of the 14th Cent. the spheres of faith and
reason are so dichotomized as to leave man's views
of this world separated into spheres of distinctive
types of truth. The moot question is whether to resolve
the problem by shrinking one of the poles to insignificance. The temptation to walk one side of a fence of
paradox is always strong and many tramped paths on
the side either of revelation or of human reason, even
though for a time most of this was done within the
realm of church authority.

But the failure had yet to become more overt. Occamism, with its stress on a sphere of coherent but
secular knowledge, led to an interest in this to the
detriment of revelation. His razor led to attempts to
simplify the ideas of nature's mode of operation by
the exclusion of the supernatural and the teleological.
With the revival of learning and a growing interest
in pre-Christian literature came a certain disdain for
the rote of much scholastic thought and the attempts
at ecclesiastical interference in the growing political,
economic, and legal freedom. In the heart of this comes
the Reformation with its doctrine of the priesthood of'
the believer, frequently (but with notable exceptions)
interpreted so as to allow considerable freedom in
man's application of revelation to the affairs of this
world and frequently fostering an interest in the question of the mode and extent of God's revelation to
each man in His creation. From this time on, the
Renaissance interest in non-Biblical thought and the
Reformation return to Biblical bases was to be in
conflict between and within individual thinkers.

Then in the late 15th Century appears Francis Bacon
to crystallize the methods of the Leonardo's and the
Gilbert's of the century just passed. We find him
derisive of scholasticism and of the idols of the past,
asking that all knowledge begin and end in sense
experience, proclaiming that all knowledge is to be
his province, and forgetting facts need prior value
judgments and present rational correlation. In him
the inductive method is crudely crystallized, but unfortunately confused and attenuated by a lack of interest in mathematical relations and a search for substances instead. At almost the same time we find the
pious Lutheran Kepler overstressing just that which
Bacon lacked (mathematical relationships, in his case
in the motions of the planets) : overstressing because
of a mystical conviction that God created and moves
the universe in simple mathematical harmonies. And
finally, in the same period Galileo, utilizing the work
of Kepler, crystallized the rising problem of the past
.several centuries.

And what is this? The question of the relation of
truth in description and truth in Scripture. The
Inquisition and Cardinal Bellarmine would have been
happy had Galileo described his work as speculative,
as theory and not as fact. Did not the Bible and tradition obviate its factuality? Galileo would have been
happier17 had they paid more attention to experiential
facts and less to the past and fallible exegesis. The
problem then is whether appearances can give an answer, both simple and precise in logic, which differs
from the grounds of those appearances. If Scripture
tells us about the world as it really is ontologically can
we place confidence, for more than utilitarian motives,
in descriptions of nature? Does the Bible use postulational language or does it use either man-oriented
modes of description or language so as to illustrate
or strengthen a revelational truth? Can science ever
go beyond description or organization according to
our schemes as researchers? Is there meaning, in
science, to any other kind of natural law?

Subsequent thought usually stresses one of these
three. The Christian generally does believe that God
does sustain a universe of laws but has the problem of
correlating changing laws of science, or presumed
laws discovered from thought alone, to this. The
empiricist stresses the availability only of appearances
and claims our thoughts cannot reason beyond this.
All else is faith. The rationalist, finally, claims an
ability to discover the secrets of nature by innate
truths and reason, claims a consistency of these with
scientific discovery, and if a Christian, claims thereby
to find what God means by His revelations about
nature.

Let us briefly discuss the thesis of the rationalist
first, specifically by illustration from the three major
figures of the school embracing almost perfectly 17th Century continental Europe.

Descartes, the earliest, strongly influenced by the
mathematical (as were the others in distinction from
the experimental bias of the English empiricists)
claimed that all that was clear and distinct was true.
First we cannot doubt our existence, then we cannot
doubt the existence of God as the conserver of our
existence, and finally we must assume the truth of
logic and the existence of the external world because God would not cause intuition, demonstration, and
appearance to lie. Having now grounded all in God,
he proceeds by steps we may ignore to remove God
from His creation leaving all that exists, including
min, part of an inexorable mechanism with which God
does not interfere. He does allow for a free mind but never integrates it satisfactorily with the determinism of man's body.

With Spinoza, infinite substance or God becomes
the eternal ground of all that is. All that exists is in
and inconceivable apart from, this substance. Our
world is an aspect of this and not a creation. In it
we may know two of the infinite attributes of God-thought and extension-but all are independent even
if everywhere as aspects of God. Thus Spinoza ends
with a pantheistic world in which freedom means only
that the action is determined by God and a world
equally well described by either the mental or the
physical.

Leibniz finally reasons to a world of monads or
independent and continuous centers of perception.
Each mirrors the universe from its point of view and
there is a harmony between the perception of any
monad and the motions of the rest of the universe.
Since there is no interaction this must be pre-established and thus deterministic. Everything has thus a
sufficient reason and man's role is to try to discover
it by more clearly perceiving the universe around him.

Thus we reach an impasse. All three leave us with
the antinomies of freedom and mechanism; Spinoza
and Leibniz continue with an eternal universe which,
for quite unclear reasons, manifests itself differently
with time; and all three face the unenviable task of
explaining how infallible reason leads to three different Gods with the attendant problem of how reason
alone can, from the nature of any of these Gods alone,
decipher the course of history and the details of nature.

Stretching between the mid-17th and the mid-18th
century we have in England a quite opposite attempt
to relate God to nature in the great empiricists Locke,
Berkeley, and Hume. All disagreed fundamentally with
the ability of unaided reason to understand reality.
Locke first challenged innate ideas, claiming all knowledge to rise from simple ideas such as sensation and
reflection received passively by the mind. These the
'mind combines, relates and abstracts into complex ideas
such as number and beauty, the conceptions of external objects, and cause and effect. Knowledge then
is the perception of agreement and disagreement of
these ideas and is of three degrees: intuited as in
mathematics and our own existence, demonstrative as
in the existence of God, and sensitive as in the assurance of an external world of items made up of a
substance with cohering primary qualities such as
shape.

Bishop Berkeley spotted a difficulty in Locke. He
rejected the existence of a world of primary qualities
and a substrate as unproven. All that exists is either
perceived (an idea) or a perceiving mind. Mind and
its content alone are real. We have only a combination
of sense qualities and the consciousness we exist as
an independent thinker. There is no evidence in sensation or reason for the belief in external objects.
God is the cause of ideas attributed to the outer world.
Of this mind and our own mind we have only notions,
and not ideas, as our ideas are passive. But if God
is the source of ideas perceived by the senses we can
trust them. On any other basis we might doubt that
the world was like our ideas of it. God also sustains
reality even when unobserved by us.

Finally Hume takes this to its apparent conclusion.
We perceive only sensations or emotions first appearing to the mind and ideas which are faint copies of
this in memory or imagination. Both are the source
of association of ideas into resemblance, identity, contiguity in space and time, and cause and effect. Matter
is thereby just a constant combination of simple ideas
given a convenient name but has no logical necessity.
Berkeley's self is rejected as we have no direct perception of it and confuse it as an object with a flow
of impressions constantly coming and going. Thus
Hume denies both material and spiritual substance
and rests solely on perceptions. Observing the contiguity and succession of impressions we assume a
necessary connection in causality. Scepticism he tries
to evade by a leap of faith in instinct and habit inducing us to believe in the reality of the world and the
validity of causal analysis. So confident was he in his
assumed uniformity of nature and in causality that
he rejected free will and miracle. God he also reduces
to an assumed ground for nature, but nothing can
be discovered precisely about His nature.

Thus empiricism rests! Berkeley, defending God's
necessary relation to nature, left man to doubt the
existence of other minds like ourselves. Hume, the
critic of Christianity, left us without even sure belief
in ourselves. He lost the whole world and lost his soul
too. And all leave us with the question of how empiricism on such grounds could attain knowledge at all.
No mind, and if a mind, no logical demonstration of
an ability to construct a philosophy of nature at all!

Thus we see the tendency of the thought of the
philosophical mind of the time. It is a trend, either
by way of reason or by way of experience, leading
to the rejection of revelation as necessary or basic to
the understanding of nature. Its weakness is the chaos
of the rationalist views of God and His relation to
our world and the ultimate scepticism implicit in empiricism. Man's reasoning and experience alone have
been tried and found wanting. Though not many contemporaries went as far as Hume, for example,
a spirit of irreligion on the continent and the limitation
of revelation to the laws of nature and by the tests
of reason in the English deists are willing bedfellows.
Did the more scientific mind of the time do any better?
Let us see.

Many forces were at work in 17th and 18th century
science but no force was so great as an inexorable
adjustment of Christian beliefs to conform to the
conclusions, of science. Natural religion rises with the
stress on reason and the growing concern with other
religions and the spiritual state of the heathen. Mechanism and the anti-miraculous sentiment grow both
in the reaction to scholasticism among Protestants and
from a misunderstood Calvinism where John Wallis's
God laying down eternal and unchangeable laws was
easy to merge with Robert Boyle's Divine Mechanic
constructing his machine. Let us survey rapidly the
fruits of the Puritan devotion and utilitarianism in
England which made, in the work of the virtuosi18
that country the scientific leader of the period of the
17th century. For these are the days of the origins of the Royal Society, of Boyle and Hooke
and Lower the pioneer physiologist, of Barrow in mathematics',
of Halley and Hobbes, and of the equal genius of
Wren and Newton.

We may characterize the century by a strain to
preserve traditional faith in the face of a burgeoning
science. Some would preserve by restricting the scientific attitude and others by fostering it. Alexander Ross'
cries in 1646, "Whereas you say that astronomy se rves
to confirm the truth of Holy Scripture you are very
preposterous; for you will have the truth of Scripture
confirmed by astronomy, but you will not have the
truth of astronomy confirmed by Scripture; sure one
would think that astronomic truths had more need of
Scriptural confirmation than the Scripture of them."19
Twenty-four years later Henry Stubbe decries the
superciliousness that implies the praises of the savant are more acceptable to God than the blind wonder of
the ignorant. Hence on one side there is a fear that
science leads to arrogance wherein scientific ideas outweigh God's Word and to a gross materialism.

The defense stresses design and harmony in the
world, replies that the study of God's natural revelation
is a truly pious task, that science will remove ignorance and superstition and clearly distinguish the
un
usual from the miraculous, that the praise of the
student is. better than blind praise, and, as Boyle remarked, that the rejection of nature to promote disbelief is as absurd as promoting atheism by the study
of the Bible.

However, the difficulties between science and Protestantism were not primarily ones of religion versus
,science but of religion versus science as science defended a view of nature mundane as to appearances
and supernatural as to inferences.20 "The sources of
rationalistic atheism were not the same as the sources
of scientific agnosticism".21

For example, where John Ray found divine omnipotence in the multiplicity of creatures in
nature,22 Newton found it in nature's mathematical simplicity. The
antithetical nature of such arguments is not of as
great import as the realization that they can apply to
either side as multiplicity and simplicity are relative.
One sun warming seven planets and seven suns warming one plant might equally argue to design through
simplicity or complexity or it might argue to caprice.

Let us say a few words about Newton for it is he,
with the Enlightenment philosophers, who raise up
deism in the next century. Newton sought God in the
precision and harmony of planets and optical spectra
but his views led where he guessed not. As Pope wrote
(but with more than he intended), "God said, 'Let
Newton be', and there was light.'- for he removed
much of the mystery in nature which to many led to
faith. Newton also thought his system raised questions
of origin.23 Later, others found here deism or atheism.
God for Newton is nearly identified with the eternity
and infinity of the world. "He constitutes duration and
space." (Though elsewhere this is qualified as space
and time become merely the sensoria of God.) As
Westfall points out, God is taking on the character
Newton assumed his creation had, and "a God deduced from nature can be no more than a projection
of nature."24

Newton also said that God occasionally restored
order to the accumulating small inequalities of the
planetary motions. Leibniz replied that this made God incompetent.25 Clarke tried to defend Newton by saying that God continually controlled nature but this
is more typically providential than Newton's spirit.26
In the 2nd edition of the Principia. Newton himself
assayed a reply but in it God's dominion is still not
made direct and immediate but "his arbitrary freedom
in shaping matter and promulgating laws at the original creation."27 Miracles are reduced to rare events
the causes of which we do not know. Natural religion
here becomes the whole of Christianity where the
virtuosi made it only the foundation.28 By it man is
to discover the power of God and His benefits and
our moral duties to God and man. Thus the work
of the virtuosi led to the Enlightenment deism with
its replacing of spiritual worship by moral law and its claim to discover true religion without special
revelation. The reverence of the 17th century virtuosi
became the doubt of the 18th-a change, not in argument, but in attitude.

But there were also those who attempted to lift
religion out of controversy onto a firm philosophical
base. These centered around the Cambridge Platonists,
modern analogues of the Alexandrians Clement and
Origin, who, as Basil Wiley points out, both made
an effort to maintain philosophy and religion as allies,
not as strangers or enemies.29 The group of Lord
Herbert, John Smith, Henry More, Joseph Glanvill
and Ralph Cudworth tried to formulate a belief commanding the universal assent of men. God's revelation
thereby was considered to go on continually as He
enlightens man's reason with Scripture intended only
to confirm the truths so discoverable from nature.
Surely this reversal of the true position of Scripture
was the type of argument that led Butler, Ray, and
Paley to what I consider their misplaced defense of
the faith on arguments from nature.30 When both
Scripture and the Platonists' arguments were ignored
their opponents, the deists, also arrived at their misplaced exclusion of God from the nature He
created.31

It should be remembered, however, that philosophy
was far advanced of science in its agnosticism as the
18th century begins and so continued for some time.
As Lecky put it, "The direct antagonism between
science and theology which appeared in Catholicism
at the time of the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo
was not seriously felt in Protestantism until geologists
began to impugn the Mosaic account of creation."32
Let us turn therefore briefly to 18th century geology
to see how it handled the relation of its data to the
Christian faith and how later an increasing breakdown
in this relation was thought by many to have been
made final by the advent of Darwinism. The measure
of a synthesis is not its duration but its donation.
How much do we retain today?

As the 19th century begins Neptunism is the dominant geological theory. While technically it was the
thesis that all rocks came from cold solutions its apologetic strength lay in its basis as a fine argument for
design in nature, it did not need excessively long ages,
and successive flooding seemed to allow varied forms
of life as distinct creations. Its competitor, Vulcanism,
which believed at least some rocks were of igneous
origin, had apparently none of these advantages. However, one has but to read Gen. I and 2 exegeted in
the light of Neptunism as in Kirwan's Geological
Essays in 1800 to see how forced even this apparent
harmony was. The spirit of God moving on the waters becomes evaporation soon after creation which led to
the crystallization of early rocks, and so on. Surely
this is isegesis of text into pretext! Indeed at this time the inspiration of Scripture was defended on just
the grounds of this supposed agreement with geology
since certainly ordinary Jewish literature could not
anticipate this. Some even went so far as to assume
God
and
Scripture could be perfectly deduced from
geological argument. But in 1802 we find Playfair
defending Vulcanism to similar ends but with a more
reasonable restriction that science could only illustrate
those portions of design and purpose appropriate to
its realm. His thesis did, however, lead to agnosticism
about the time and nature of creation as we cannot
know more than the laws operating since then which
are those of the present.

About this time Catastrophism arose as Sir James
Hall, explaining Alpine valleys by a tidal wave, disagreed with Playfair that laws of nature have been the
same since creation. (Here are the direct origins of
present-day flood geology). The subsequent disagreements led by about 1820 to a truce whereby Scripture
was no longer connected in detail to geology but where
it sufficed that there be no contradictions with Moses'
more detailed (sic) account. Much present Christian
thought here is the offspring of this.

Win. Buckland and Cuvier the paleontologist in the
early 1820's developed Catastrophism into a sequence
of universal deluges following the rising of continental areas and mountain belts. After each, new life
was created. All this was used for a great argument
for design, for the interdependence of life and the
environment, and for the manifest destiny of Britain
with its bounty of economic minerals. It was Buckland
also who raised the 'ages-day' interpretation of the
creative week to popularity. It was he too who argued
that deviations from general natural laws was God's
way of showing us Him immanence. But does it not
argue rather for a more Newtonian occasional interf erence ?

But the facts were slowly causing an attrition in the
Catastrophist camp and Lyell rose to generalize the
views of Hutton and Playfair into his principle of
uniformity which taught the constancy of the tempo
and energy of present laws as we move into the past.
"If Buckland feared that without cataclysms there
was no God, Lyell was as fundamentally apprehensive
lest, without uniformity, there be no science", Gillispie remarks.33 To be sure such a view of uniformitarianism is much too simple for
today34 and this may be
illustrated by his inability to reconcile this with any
thesis of evolution in past life.35

Lyell did not go unchallenged. Sedgwick, one-time
president of the Geological Society, claimed uniformitarianism to be Ptolemaic, arguing that it rejected belief in all not seen or done by us. It circumscribed God's
actions to our ignorance of them. Conybeare also
argued that the degree and intensity of past causes
has changed-a quite modern view!

In 1844 Chambers wrote his
Vestiges of Creation
in which he held that primitive and simple life developed by very tiny steps into the more complex. The
"tiny steps" were from one specie to another. The
writer anticipated, and got, violent reaction so that
he kept his name secret for 40 years. Sedgwick claimed
it annulled all distinction between physical and moral,
thereby degrading man. He wrote in like vein to Darwin in 1859. Hugh Miller argued that the strata
showed no such simple pattern and suggested a degradation theory instead. Others claimed it did away with
design but Miller argues that it does away with much
more-man's responsibility and immortality.

But interest in evolution was growing.35 Whewell
and Brewster carried on a debate even before the
publication of Darwin's work on the possibility of life
on other planets. When Darwin published his
Origin
in 1859 it was to be only 25 years or so before most
of the intellectual community had accepted it. With
the plethora of books and articles on the issue appearing in this centenary year I need not recall the detailed
events. But let us very quickly complete our "survey
with the big brush" by noting the impact evolutionism
had on various areas of thought. just as there are
philosophies of science which change with our ideas
of nature and our relation to it, there are philosophies
front
science which stop with the scientific view from
which they grew even when it is long past. Such as
the latter are most of the subsequent trends in evolutionism as a creed.36

For one thing, evolution was used to argue for
everything from the most extreme forms of capitalism
to Marxism. It had an impact on historical scholarship
as in Andrew White and Win. Draper and the massive
field of philosophies of history.37 Certainly it had
tremendous impact on philosophy where pragmatism,
Smut's holism, Spencer, Bergson, Alexander, Morgan,
de Nouy, and modern organicism were saturated with
it, but in vastly different ways.38 But its greatest impact was on
theology.39 This ranged from the extremes
of the Scopes trial to modernism of the early decades
of our century. Some used it to defend imperialism
and racial superiority. Others construed it as a basis
for optimism and humanitarianism. Some rejected it
entirely as in Chas. Hodge's, "It is atheism." Still
others tried thereby to reconcile theology and science
or develop a new theology based on evolutionary science, so that by 1890 evolution was fully recognize([
1)y the leaders of the liberal movement. History became
the evolution of divinity out of humanity, the evolution
of the kingdom of God on earth. God became immanent
in nature; what Jesus was man is becoming, and sin
is mere lapse into man's past animal nature.40

Our survey of the past is now complete. The certainties of one age have become the problems of the
next and temporal prejudices have apparently often
been mistaken for timeless convictions. Well might
one cry with Kierkegaard, "Lord, give us weak eyes
for things that are of no account, and clear eyes for
all your truths." Yet surely my peregrinations will
have been most odious if we do not learn. We cannot
operate on the strange assumption that by not taking
thought we can add one cubit to our stature. Let us
ponder a while.

We have learned first the dangers of the Thomistic
conclusion that man, unaided, can find God. Apart
from the problem it immediately raised as to how
much we might find and the logical question of whether
one can indeed accept the traditional arguments at all
(now almost universally settled in the negative by
philosophers outside of Thomism)41 there is the additional broader stricture that sinful man of himself
cannot know God. As a man sows his axioms so shall
he reap his deductions. No one can validly deduce
more than that with which he begins. If he does not
start with God as sovereign he will not end up with
Him. Nor can a man induce the Biblical God from
observations in nature. A God who might act in nature doesn't prove that He did. Also, God is not exhausted in His natural revelation and it is thus insufficient to give all truth about Him as Hume pointed
out long ago.

But there is a greater difficulty here yet. If we look
at nature we must evaluate the evidence for God on
our prior criteria of judgment. But this has led, in
some philosophers, to the problem of evil implying a
finite God and in others to the scepticism of Russell's
Free Man's Worship. Our criteria can only come from
God Himself.42 If we accept them knowingly we then
have already accepted God as speaking in Scripture.
If unknowingly, any agreement we find with what a
Christian finds in nature is a product of a violence
we do to our own prideful and self-centered assumptions in accreting to these items from a Christian
heritage or melieu.43

I believe we must say the same about the history
of Rationalism. Its many different Gods, all supposedly
self-evident, and its great difficulty in deriving particular events from its generalities only reveal what
we have said above.44 Sinful man wards off the revelation of God. He is blind and cannot see, but he is
responsible for this as his life and world-view are the
antithesis of the acceptance of God as sovereign. He
cannot isolate his reason from his life and faith consistently, so how may reason find the God his worldview denies? (The same applies to the Christian. How
can he presume to find the God who speaks through
Scripture and in Whom he believes by isolating his
reason and arguing independently to God thereby? He
will conclude either with a God in his own image or
surreptitiously he will introduce elements of Christian
theology and end with the God of Scripture only to
that degree. Neither is satisfactory.) Descartes said
that it was inconceivable that God would implant reason in man so as deliberately to lead him in error. He
was right. Man is the source of the error.

Empiricism likewise failed. Pretending to work out
from experiences it failed to find the ordered world
of God with which it needs must start. Consistency
demanded that it fragmentize nature. Indeed it ended
up by distintegrating the self! Our point then is
crucial. Only by starting with God as person, as creator and sustainer; with man as made in His image
but now fallen; and with the fact of moral and physical
evil can one ever correctly see the world. Wm. Temple,
in his great study of natural religion and theology, remarked that the primary assurances of religion are
the ultimate questions of philosophy.45 May I interpret
this to mean that one must move from a theistic starting point to philosophy and science? Then, and then
alone, will we find the confirmation of the original
belief.

Let us now turn to the implications of this. There
are never any facts without interpretations thereof
or organizations of these without prior working judgments. A truly Baconian science is thus a figment of
the imagination. Nor can man-centered interpretations
ever assume the necessity of universal assent. Certainly
they have never got it! The system of the Cambridge
Platonists has come and gone. The arguments from
design of Ray and Newton, of Butler and Paley, of the
Bridgewater Treatises, of Kirwan and Playfair, or
yet again of an Eddington or a Morrison, apart from
their often contradictory nature have never achieved
more than transitory acceptance.46 They special plead,47
their God is finite and changes with their judgments
about Him, and when consistently argued becomes
merely a personification of nature. Like the camel he
partakes of that awkward look as if assembled by committee.48

We must also reject the claim that knowledge in the
Christian is arrogance. Where the unregenerate should
see God but refuses the Christian can see God and
give meaning and purpose to the scientific work that
he does. Indeed, in the mind conscious of God in the
world, there is an obligation to study God's hand in
every realm of nature and life. Where sin caused the
distinction of special from general revelation, the Christian must use the former to restore perspecuity to the
latter.

But we must therein correctly construe this relationship of Bible and nature. Science is not the judge
of Scripture. The exegetical crudities of Neptunism
or Catastrophism or the forced constructions of many
modern writers are to be abhored. While the Bible
does not settle the operational usefulness of theories
in any science it does require that the construction of
these assume as axiomatic the propositions of God's
special revelation. The unregenerate, in violence to the
incoherence of their theological assumptions, derive
brilliant systems in spite of themselves but the believer's choice of these, or of others of his own construction, must be couched in the framework of theistic
presuppositions. Thus a thorough mechanistic theory
of nature may be quite useful to Christian or nonChristian but whether it is interpreted providentially,
deistically, pantheistically, or atheistically depends on
what one believes to begin with.49 The apparent nature of the world neither proves God nor the inspiration
of passages of Scripture supposedly teaching this assumed nature, nor the antithesis of these, but rather
it confirms our view of God and His Word and reveals
the incoherence of any other view.

We may now suggest the basic structure of an evangelical philosophy of science. Built upon the foundations mentioned and delimited by these, it will
none-the-less be temporal and on-going. It must not only
speak to the problems of its time but it must see God's
revelation in nature as unfolding under its scrutiny.
How prone we are to stagnation! Much current Conservative literature in the field could have been written
centuries ago. If this were because of lasting truth no
one could gainsay the import, but much of it is the
error of the past couched in new material. What is the
placing of God in some fourth dimension but a ridiculous modern deism? What is a God in the indeterminancy of atomic physics, the "deft touches" of Milne's
cosmology , or the gaps of the fossil record but Newton
and Cuvier all over again?50

Surely our scientific philosophy must retort strongly
to the current stress upon the general revelation of
God in much contemporary philosophy due to its deemphasis of Scripture. Scripture must be seen as the
unique revelation of the Archimedean point of truth
which is God. Of course it must be interpreted with
great care. Interpretation must try to be ahead of, not
a generation behind, what is lasting in science. Unfortunately hermenutical principles do not arise entirely in Scripture and sometimes the development of
human thought has had to lead us to re-examine and
revise specific exegesis. We must walk carefully between the appearance of continually fudging Scripture
to fit scientific advance and a too-broad interpretation
of the text. But if we must err let us err toward the
latter, giving every possible latitude in interpretation
apparently consonant with inspiration and the internal
unity of Scripture. And then let us clearly recognize
that, of scientific theories thereby given latitude, we
pick the theory on the grounds of its suggestiveness
of future experiment, its ability to organize data, and
its coherence with our entire world view.51

Of all the tasks for hermeneutical theory and Christian philosophy of science, this tension and its exploration and partial resolution are the greatest. The Jew
reading the creation account saw it elaborated in whatever knowledge of nature he had; early
19th century geology and biology saw Genesis illuminated therein; and we see it amplified by our data. God's
revelation in Scripture must be sufficient to present all that God
desires in any age. And what is it that changes from
age to age but insight into the meaning of Biblical
statements and our knowledge of nature? The great truths of God's nature, plan, and purpose
always speak with sufficiency in Scripture but further insight comes by patient linguistic research and scientific
study.

But the coin has another side. Science, by its very
nature, assumes a regularity in nature.52 It develops
descriptive theories and constructs prescriptive models
or laws into which it organizes nature.53 With time
both change, but always they will exclude certain things. For example, miracle cannot nose into the tent
via probability considerations or indeterminism54 and
even the Christian rejects miracles in his working
model of science and places them only in a non-predictive model embracing God and nature. Creation
cannot steal in through entropy or arguments about
design and first cause. Neither logic nor scientific working models can settle the argument of whether
the universe has or has not a finite age. Only a broader
scheme inclusive of God and His revelation can do
this. The origin of life may be discussed and even achieved but this can never prove that life did originate
in any given way in the past. A Christian may construct physico-chemical descriptions of the origin and
development of life but at best they are only highly possible. His thesis that God is its source and sustainer
is a model in another level of discourse including the
scientific models as possible manners in which we can
describe God's actions. Indeed here is the major point
regarding a Christian philosophy of science.

The Philosophy of Science can never be ultimate to
the Christian. Indeed it can never consistently be ultimate to the non-Christian. It is a discipline organizing
the varied sciences and suggesting techniques of exploring its field of study. It does this with
whatever foundational principles it desires, but only one group can consistently integrate with all we know
and are. For the Christian these are the understanding that
God, as creator of the universe, is to be seen in it
and that it is a universe sustained in law by Him and
also the understanding that these principles we arrive
at through theology. But theology itself is not ultimate as it is, in turn, a special science dealing with the
propositions of Scripture. What then is ultimate for
us? It is a philosophy embracing theology, philosophy
of science, and system organizing the other disciplines
of human experience; a philosophy grounded in the
revelations of Scripture. In other words, a truly Christian philosophy must begin with the self-disclosure of
God.

Thus we see that at the root of all we know and
are lies God. God is thus revealed in all that is His
handiwork, but because of sin His special revelation
in Scripture becomes the only light by which this may
be seen. Hence the propositions of Scripture become
axioms in a truly Christian Philosophy. It is the role
of theology to attempt organization of these but no
doctrine or creed can be accepted as final. Finality
lies only in the discreet statements of Scripture. The
organization of these is ours and hence liable to error.
Theological statements, therefore, are to be continually
appraised both from the side of improving our knowledge of what the Bible really says and from the side
of semantical. clarification and improved ability to encompass the statements of science. Our faith is never
a faith in theology. Nor is it a faith in science. It is faith in God as creator and sustainer of all that is.
Indeed, it is a mistake, I think, to view theology or
science as an aid to faith. If we have no faith in God
to start with we will never get it by any human study
and if we
do
have faith, we will only find in the varied
areas of experience that which we expect anyway.

But there is one last point. While theological models
(or if you like systematic organizations) by their very
nature try to organize the revelations of Scripture
which cover every area of God's creation. This does
not imply that they thereby settle disputed questions
in these areas. The operational principles making for
fruitful scientific endeavor have their own realm of
discourse and this does not treat of origins, of purpose
of meaning. Both make a mistake when they overstate
their appropriate bounds.55

And thus we finish. But this is but the beginning.
I have done very little with respect to exploring in
detail the relations of theology to science, of the
semantics of theological statements and of scientific statements,56 with the precise place of teleology and
miracle, with the social sciences and their relationship
to those physical, with the relations of the humanities
and the sciences, with the nature of mathematics, with
the sociology of value judgmens in science, or with
the technical data of and staggering quantities of precise philosophical studies of science. The work for
Christians here is immense and most that I have seen
is a.diarrhea of promise and a constipation of fulfillment. Let us, however, not become enthusiasts but
rather enthusiastic. For the former, as you have heard,
is a person who, having completely lost sight of his
objectives, redoubles his efforts. Our objective must
never be forgotten and our Christian philosophy must
guide our every step?

References

1. J. B. S. Haldane,
Facts and Faith, p. 107.
2.
John Baillie,
Natural Science and the Spiritual Life, p. 6.
3. See C. A. Coulson,
Science and the Idea of God.
4. Quoted in his
Belief and Unbelief Since
1850. James Orr
also pointed out that perhaps the conflict of science with religion
lies more in the general outlook of science than in its specific
results.

17.
See his letter to Christina in S. Drake (ed),
Discoveries
and Opinions of Galileo.

18.
See R. K. Merton,
Osiris, 1938, pp. 360-632.

19.
Quoted in R. Westfal, op
cit.
Richard Baxter also wrote
against the arrogance of testing God and the Epicurean atomism
of the time. "They cut off and deny the noblest parts of nature
and then sweep together the dust of agitated atoms and tell
us that they have resolved all the phenomena of nature." p.
23.

20. C . C.
Gillespie,
Genesis and Geology, p. ix.

21. Ibid. p. x.

22.
Compare here Prolusion
7
of Milton's
Paradise L st.
"When I behold the goodly Frame, the World of Heaven and
Earth consisting, and compute their magnitudes, this Earth a
spot, a grain, an Atom with the firmament compared, and all
her numbered Stars, that seem to rowle Spaces incomprehensible merely to officiate light around this opacous Earth, this
punctual Spot, one day or night; in all their vast survey useless
besides, reasoning I oft admire, How nature wise and frugal
would commit such disproportions."

23. In the Optiks we read: "The main business of natural
philosophy is to argue from phenomena without feigning hypotheses, and to deduce causes from effects till we come to the
very first cause, which certainly is not mechanical."" And aag in
we read, "Whence is it that nature does nothing in vain?" Compare this with Sir Thomas Browne's creed in
Religio Medici.
"Every essence created or uncreated, hath its final cause and
some positive end both of its Essence and Operation. This is
the cause I grope after in the works of nature; on this hangs
the Providence of God." (1, 19).

24. Op
cit., p.
24.

25. And cannot we see Hume gleefully agreeing later as for
him, at best, God can be considered to be only as great as the
universe is construed to reveal.

27. Westfal, op
cit, p.
202. We may note here Paley's later
comment that astronomy might, by the perfection of its processes, lead to a neglect of God as things too trivial led us to
self-sufficient principles and not to a skillful Will behind them.
However, he claims that after studying anatomy we may then
turn to find the comparative sublimity of God in this area of
nature.
Natural Theology, pp.
260-279.

28. "In his drive for a rationally demonstrable religion he
excluded the spiritual element in Christianity." Westfal, loc
cit.

29.
The 17th Century Background, p.
126.

30. Ray,
Wisdom
of
God in the Works of Creation;
Paley,
Evidences of Christianity
and
Natural Theology (so
well
known to Darwin as a youth) ; and Butler,
Analogy
(for
critiques from quite different perspectives see A. DuncanJones,
Butler's Moral Philosophy
and C. Van Til,
Christian
Theistic Evidences).

31. See John Toland,
Christianity Not Mysterious

Pantheisticon;
Tindal, Christianity
as Old as the Creation; Woolston, Six Discourses on the Miracles of Our
Savior, and Morgan, The Moral Philosopher.

32. A History of England in
the 18th Century, 11, p. 571.
33. Op cit, p. 121.
34. See R.
liooykaas, "The Principle of Uniformity in Geology, Biology, and
Theology," Trans. of the Victoria institute, 1956.

35. Though
he believes all forms of life to have been around since creation many forms he
considers to have not fossilized in the early history of the earth, thus we
think they appeared late. klowever, he is inconsistent here, as he argues from
the absence of fossils to the recent origin of man.

35. See
articles in the Scientiftc American, May and February 1959; in P-ndeavor
of April 1958; in the American Scicnlist, December 1958; also
Jan Lever, Creation and Evolution; L. Eiseley, Varwin's Century; the
Journal of the History of Ideas, June 1956; Ayer (ed), Ideas
and Beliefs of Victorians; Fothergill, Historical Aspects of Organic
Evolution; Darwin, Autootography; and Clark, Darwin, Before and
After.

36. See
particularly S. Persons, Evolutionary Thought in America; The Antioch Review,
Spring 1959; R. Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought; and
E. A. White, Science and Religion in American Thought.

37. See
any of the multitude of works and articles available in historiographical
survey. Stern, Dray, Munk, Renier, and Geyl have all excellent studies. See also
articles in the Christian Scholar, March 1957, and in the Personalist,
Autumn 1956.

38. Wiener,
Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism; M. White, The Origins of
Dewey's Instrumentalism.- and E. A. White, op cit all discuss
pragmatism and evolution. Main Currents in Modern Thought, a bi-monthly
journal and G. Cannon, The Evolution of Living Things are defenders of a
somewhat teleological organicism.

39. See
Ginger, Six Days or Forever, 1958 and the article in the January issue of
the Scientific American for discussions of the Scopes trial. See also
David Lack, Evolutionary Theory and Christian Belief, 1958; Jan Lever, op
cit; E. A. White, op cit; and Ira Brown, Lyman Abbott.

40. As in
C. W. Sajous, Strength of Religion as Shown by Science, 1926, where we
find the fall becoming "a solemn plea to mankind to beware ofthe animal
instincts which the animal inheritance of the body includes." A recent
writer states also, "Original sin is the mark of the beast from which we
have come, still lingering and still to be overcome. It becomes sin only when
man has reached a stage where he was conscious of choice and chose the lower
part". See Wallace, Religion, Science and the Modern World, 1952.

41. Though
some still do. See S. Hackett, The Resurrection of Theism; J. C. Monsma, The
Evidence of God in an Expanding Universe; and Cressy Morrison, Man Does
Not Stand Alone. Of course, for Catholics, the Vatican Council of 1870 said
God could be known through nature and the anti-modernistic agreement of 1910
interpreted this to mean that God could be proven. However, some
Catholic writers assume science incapable of this. "I cannot agree . . .
that physical science within its own universe of discourse as understood by
itself can grasp final causes. The force of the data presented would seem to be
that physical science is dealing with data which are not entirely explainable
within the framework and method of science itself, and that for sheer
explanation a discipline superior to physical science is needed." Proc.
Amer. Catholic Philosophical Assoc., 1952, p. 195. For Catholic discussion
of science see H. J. Koren, Readings in the Philosophy of Nature, 1958; H.
Van Laer, The Philosophy of Science and Philosophico-Scientific
Problems; A. van Melsen, The Philosophy of Nature, 1954: and Kane et
al, Science Synthesis. See also P. J. McLaughlin, The Church and
Modern Science, 1957 and Hauret, Beginnings.

42. Gordon
Clark in Carl F. H. Henry, Revelation and the Bible, points out that even
a sinless Adam had to have God speak. Note also Berdyaev's remark that
"philosophy is anthropocentric but the philosopher ought to be theocentric,"
in The Beginning and the End.

43. T. H.
L. Parker, Calvin's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God, 1959.

44. E.
J. Carnell states, "Whereas philosophy seeks to explain the heart by a God
gained through the examination of nature, Christianity seeks to explain nature
by a God gained through an examination of the heart." A Philosophy of
the Christian Religion, p. 274.

45.
Nature, Man and God. The
Gifford Lectures of 1956. For further elaboration of my point see Herman
Bavinck, The Philosophy of Revelation. For,much more detailed criticisms
of Thomism, rationalism, and empiricism see G. Clark, From Thales to Dewey;
C. Van Til, op cit and his Apologetics; and the magnificent A New
Critique of Theoretical Thought by H. Dooyeweerd.

46. See the
fascinating study, Revelation and Religion, by H. H. Farmer.

47. As R.
E. D. Clark put it in his Scientific Rationalism and Christian Faith, "The
world is very largely colored by our own spectacles. The 'rationists' are
careful to put on dark spectacles when they are arguing with theologians, but
very rosy ones when they are dreaming of evolution or world utopias." p.
86. But he then turns around and does it himself. See his Creation, 1953.

48. Bernal,
in his Science and Ethics rightly claims of such arguments that God
survives only to explain the origin of the universe or of life. He is thus just
a vague form: a name for our ignorance.

49.
"The reason why the Victorian world contained nothing corresponding to
religious experience is then obviously because religious experience had not been
taken into account in building it up." Herbert Dingle, The Sources of
Eddington's Philosophy. (I do not agree, however, with what Dingle thinks
this implies.) See also S. Stebbing, Philosophy and the Physicists for a
critical analysis of the views of Eddington and Jeans.

50. Ernst
Cassirer, Determinism and Indeterminism in Modern Physics, states,
"Ethical freedom . . . (where ethics takes shelter in gaps in scientific
knowledge) . . . would somehow be tolerated in the world but it could not exert
any effect, any true power; it could not move anything outward. Yet . . .
everything depends on this outward influence." p. 198. Is this not similar
to our point?

51. As
d'Abro points out in his Evolution of Scientific Thought, introducing ad
hoc hypotheses continually demands we keep doing this with each deviant
case. This removes the predictability from science. We must instead choose new
axioms giving simple and apparently consistent results. See p. xv. See also G.
Clark, op cit, p. 209.

52. And the
Christian must not reject it with impunity at every desire to argue progressive
creation or a reluctance to accept age determinations. It is very easy to end up
in solipsism 1

53. On the
theoretical structure of even mathematics see Max Black, The Nature of
Mathematics and G. Berry, "Paradox and Logical Uncertainty", Philosophical
Forum, 1957. On problems with induction see S. F. Barker, Induction and
Hypothesis. For theory construction see P. Frank, A Philosophy of Modern
Science; H. Mehlberg, The Reach of Science; and J. G. Kemeny, A
Philosopher Looks at Science.

54. See
Ernst Cassirer, op cit, pp. 203-205 and David Bohm, Causality and
Chance in Modern Physics, 1957. On philosophical issues in quantum mechanics
see S. Korner (ed), Observation and Interpretation.

55. For a
similar discussion see, in increasing order of complexity, J. M. Spier, What
is Calvanistic Philosophy? R. J. Rushdoony, By What Standard J. M.
Spier, An Introduction to Christian Philosophy; C. Van Til, op cit; and
H. Dooyeweerd.

56. A great
deal of work is going on here though it leaves much to be desired in most cases.
See T. R. Miles Religion and the Scientific Outlook; Flew and M'acIntyre
(eds), New Essays in Philosophical Theology; M. Foster, Mystery and
Philosophy; B. Mitchell (ed), Faith and Logic; E. L. Mascall, Existence
and Analogy; S. Toulmin et al, Metaphysical Beliefs; and I. T.
Ramsey's Religious Language and Miracles.